Stop Wasting Your ALT Attributes and Make them Work for You
Hey, you're new. We like you already! You obviously have great taste! If you like what you read here you'll probably want to subscribe to our RSS feed (or the audio RSS feed). Stick around and be sure to speak up and post a comment or two!
When providing SEO advice on the topic of website design, we often warn against placing important content into images. This is because search engines can’t read images like a person can. To them, an image with text is just an image. They really have no idea what the image is or if, in fact, it says anything at all. So when optimizing sites, anytime we are dealing with keyword optimized content, we want to make sure it’s standard HTML text. This includes headers, benefit lits, and even normal body copy.
While the search engines can’t read actual images, they can read what we say about the image. This information can be gleaned a few different ways:
- Image file name (image1234.jpg vs. mustang-gt.jpg)
- Text immediately surrounding the image
- The overall content of the page the image is on
- Image ALT attribute in the image tag
When trying to optimize images for image search, all of these can provide important indicators the search engines use to produce the best set of image results. In terms of traditional optimization and website usability, the ALT attribute plays an important role.
Every year Reno puts on a rodeo event. I know this, not because I live here, but because every year approximately one person asks me, “are you going to the rodeo?”
